Intro

A simplistic PWS (Personal Weather Station) and driver using a BME280 chip (temperature, huidity and air pressure) with the WeeWX software.

Background

Since it's not a full and well-known PWS setup, I followed the instructions in the customization guide to write the driver. It's based on the fileparser driver which is installed like this.

Hardware

This software supports the BME280 integrated environment sensor from Bosch for providing temperature, air pressure and humidity readings. It is assumed you have this sensor connected to an I2C bus on e.g. a Raspberry Pi.

Software Requirements

• A WeeWX PWS server running on the host (e.g. a Raspberry Pi)
• The Python RPi.BME280 library to interface with the sensor
• And the smbus2 library

Driver Installation

Download the latest release.

Run the following commands:

sudo wee_extension --install bme280wx.zip
sudo wee_config --reconfigure
sudo /etc/init.d/weewx stop
sudo /etc/init.d/weewx start

To uninstall, just run wee_extension --uninstall BME280WX.

Manual Driver Configuration

Run i2cdetect -y 1 (where 1 is the I2C port number) from a command line to get the I2C address of the BME280 sensor.

Add the following to /etc/weewx/weewx.conf:

[Station]
    station_type = BME280

[BME280]
    poll_interval = 2          # number of seconds
    i2c_port = 1               # also the port number used in the comment below
    i2c_address = 0x76         # check this by running `i2cdetect -y 1` from a command-line (hex value)

Credit

Thanks to the friendly WeeWX development forum for pointing me in the right direction.

Other

As a side-note, there is also this useful extension if you have an existing PWS and would like to add additional BME280 sensors.